Thursday, April 07, 2016

A little history of the Klan

Some students at Indiana University saw a Dominican Priest and took him to be Klansman, sparking a campus-wide panic. Students were advised to stay in their rooms lest they be ... what?

There are several interesting things about this including the fact that even those students who felt foolish to have been "misinformed" still feel that the presence of s single member of the KKK was a life-threatening event which should have been followed by sheltering in place as if there was an active shooter on campus.

As a service to college students everywhere, here is an essay by Jonathan Swift, Jr. on the Klan.

The descent of American liberal arts programs into insignificance is simply pathetic. I have visited many campuses on my long driving trips throughout the states.

I have found that the vast majority of American college students are geographically illiterate and historically illiterate, unable to locate major countries on a map or even to place major historical events even in the correct century. This makes them unable to see current events with any perspective at all, to even be able to gauge relative threats or understand the degree of prosperity and the advantages that almost every American enjoys, blessings that were simply unknown throughout the long course of human history.

Instead, these mincing little people have been raised by helicopter parents like some sort of human veal, so we have the specter of $40,000 a year college students, who enjoy resort style living and climbing walls, who compete in a perpetual Olympics of Victimhood, often comparing themselves to slaves no less. The fact that any American college student can compare themselves to human chattel, often beaten, treated like and animal and deprived of their liberty, show you the lack of intelligence on the modern campus, let alone perspective.

Anyone who mistakes a priest in cassock for a hooded member of the Klu Klux Klan is of course a fool. A fool that is so marinaded in the Church of Perpetual Victimhood, that they see pervasive racism and disabling bigotry everywhere. Of course, a well adjusted person would realize that the miracle of America is not how poorly people get along in the most integrated and ethnically diverse nation the world has ever known, but how well they do! How many people who were at each other's throats in the "old country" meet and marry, how there are millions and millions of mixed race people. Of course an intelligent person would understand that if America was horrible, no one would be clamoring to go there, but that of course would require some working synapses, which are in short supply on the leftist dominated campus.

Regarding the noxious Klan, perhaps some actual history is in order, for the real Klan once had its evil tentacles into even Indiana.

The Klan was of course founded as an adjunct to the Democratic Party after the Civil War to combat Reconstruction and to discourage black Republicans from being elected. It was started by a number of former Confederate officers including apparently Gen. Nathan "That Devid" Forrest. While the South was still occupied by the Union Army, the United States, there were a number of courageous blacks who were elected to office in spite of intimidation and terrorism by the Klan.

The Klan gradually faded into the rearview mirror until the Progressive Era, when the second incarnation of the Klan was started. It was of course glorified by the landmark film "Birth of a Nation," in 1915, which was even shown in Wilson'a White House. The racist President Woodrow Wilson (D), worked to segregate the federal government. The second was a massive enterprise, a fraternal as well as terrorist organization, which had chapters across the Democrat's solid south and well as in the north and west. It peaked in the 1920s, when it was able to march on Washington and boasted at least 3,000,000 members, who were racist, anti-Catholic as well as anti-Semitic. The second Klan feel apart quickly during the Great Depression.

One of the most stellar Klu Klux Klan Democrats was David Curtis Stephenson, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in his adopted state of Indiana. Along with may of the other local Democrats, who whored around, drank and when he was convicted of abducting and raping a young white woman who died from his bites, it embarrassed the Klan, leading to its rapid decline. His trial and the corruption and payoffs it exposed even reached into the Indiana GOP.

The third Klan was revived in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the rise of black Americans and efforts to integrate the south. At that time the South was of course solidly Democratic and well known Democrats like George Wallace (D), Governor of Alabama, Orval Faubus (D), Governor of Arkansas, Lester Maddox (D), Governor of Georgia, later Lieutenant Governor under Jimmy Carter (D), all fought integration and Civil Rights for blacks. Another legendary Klan member was Senator Robert C. Byrd (D), West Virginia. Senator Byrd was one of the greatest Democratic politicians of all time and the longest serving Senator, who was in office more than fifty years. One can see this legendary Democrat's name on public buildings across West Virginia and this wonderful Democrat was also a great leader in the Klu Klux Klan, an Exalted Cyclops no less. He was very open about his racist views:

shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

— Robert C. Byrd, in a letter to Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D-MS), 1944

The third incarnation of the Klan fortunately faded as integration was forced upon the South. Today, it is down to about 3,000 - 6,000 pathetic individuals, out of a population of about 315,000,000. There is very little Klan activity today and none that I am aware of on a college campus.

So campus cupcakes, please worry about taking a meaningful class or two between shouting down speakers you don't want to hear or running and hidings from Trump chalkers and chalkenings. Don't worry your empty little heads about the Klan, they are not a meaningful presence on the campus of today, your own professors, many of whom have a contempt for the First Amendment, are the totalitarians on campus and of course there are a number or convicted leftist terrorists who are now university professors no less.